The Story of Your Life is an exploration of how social media storytelling has transformed the way we make sense of our own experiences, and an incitement to embrace the ways our lives resist capture.


Kathryn Jezer-Morton, the sociologist and journalist behind 'Brooding', her newsletter at New York magazine's The Cut, breaks down social media tropes around everything from engagements to birthday parties to divorce. In so doing, Kathryn aims to uncover the deeper truths about how what we see and share on social media is rewriting the ways we make sense of our own everyday experiences. How has online dating influenced the way we see (or fail to see) each other? What do we consciously and subconsciously teach our kids when we painstakingly plan and document milestones and celebrations? How do our vacations, our homes, and our politics show up online - and how does what we see online impact the way we travel, decorate, and think about our values?


The Story of Your Life explores these ideas and invites the reader to start thinking differently about how we interact with social media and the world.

"The Story of Your Life is an essential study of the ordinary use of social media - it's poignant and easygoing and never preachy, and crucially, it's focused on people who exist outside over-dissected coastal norms. Jezer-Morton is utterly free of defensive postures and self-righteousness, averse to the cynicism about others and false innocence about the self that defines so much of the internet - yet she's always a sharp, generous critic of these very things. This book is a classic in the critical project of relating surface to structure, and a milestone work on what's lost when our narrative imagination is disciplined into a rigid, optimized, phone-shaped norm." - Jia Tolentino, New York Times best-selling author of Trick Mirror

"An unexpectedly moving look at how algorithmic social platforms shape not just our tastes but our capacity to discern and process our own experiences, and imagine the boundaries of our possible futures. The Story of Your Life manages to both alarm and reassure, exposing social media's power over us while reminding us that storytelling - the medium humans have always relied on for survival - is endlessly resilient." - Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less and Filterworld

"Whenever I want to think more carefully about something in my online world that annoys or fascinates me, I go to Kathryn Jezer-Morton. She's a trenchant analyst who's also a nuance queen - and The Story of Your Life is Jezer-Morton operating at the height of her (tremendous) powers." - Anne Helen Petersen, author of Out of Office and Can't Even

"The Story of Your Lifeoffers a thought-provoking analysis on what exactly we're doing with all our many hours of screen time - namely, how and why we share, consume, and experience life through social media." - Harper's Bazaar

"Smart, sharply observed analysis . . . This fascinating portrait of social media is essential for understanding how tech companies shape how we share, talk about, and make sense of our own lives. A lively, irreverent journey." - Kirkus Reviews

"Jezer-Morton smartly combines the personal with the political in this analysis of social media-part memoir, part ethnography, and part speculation . . . A compelling, accessible synthesis of philosophy and personal narrative, exploring how users conform to social media's logic, which encourages the flattening of nuance, whimsy, and the understanding of a good life." - Library Journal

"A shrewd analysis of how social media has restricted the stories people tell about themselves and others." - Publishers Weekly

"Well researched and thoughtful . . . This is a timely book that is a must-read for our online world." - Booklist

"For anyone looking for the definitive take on how influencer culture shapes our world, Jezer-Morton is sure to deliver." - Amazon, 'Most-Anticipated Books of Summer 2026'